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Vendor and vendor bank approval workflows - How should it work when creating new vendors?

Hello,

We are setting up an approval flow for vendors and one for vendor bank accounts. I find myself asking a couple of questions as we examine the OOB functionality. I will list a few question below the ideal described to-be scenarion

For the Vendor approval workflow we want to initiate an approval workflow when creating and/or changing vendors.
- Questions:
  - a: How does this work for new vendors? It seems quite clunky as we can populate the mandatory fields (name, group, tax group, etc.) then for each field that requires approval we now get the change proposal view. So the person that receives this change proposal to approve will have to review the vendor account and all its information (such as vendor group, tax group, name etc.) and then review the "changes" in a separate view. This is not the smoothest user experience, the ideal would be to populate everything (or as much as possible) and then send it for approval. Is this the only way it can work?
    - Sidenote, from what I understand there is no way of initiating a workflow on vendor creation, but in our case a workflow should always be triggered because we have to enter default bank account, and in order to enter bank account information we have to exit the vendor card and go to the vendor bank account form which in turn "saves" this new vendor and as we return to the vendor, after having created the bank account, to populate the bank account field, we are "changing" it from empty to a value.
  - b: Would there be a way of building a workflow that triggers when a new vendor is created, and then only trigger the change request workflow when there are actual changes from value A to value B? Meaning, if we create a new one we are populating the fields for the first time, we are not technically changing from "nothing" to a value.
For the Vendor bank account approval workflow we want to initiate an approval workflow when creating and/or changing vendor bank accounts.
- Question:
  - b: If we chose to have vendor bank account approval on creation for a new vendor, this causes issues as we need to get the bank account approved before we can assign the default bank account, thus completing the vendor. We already have to approve "changes" to the vendor if we accidentally save it before having populated all the data necessary. Then we have to approve the bank account creation. Then we have to approve the change as we apply the bank account in the bank account field. Is this the process we are at mercy to or can it be changed via configuring the workflow?

Any input on this topic, whether it is responding to the above scenario or just sharing how your process looks like, is greatly appreciated.

Oskar

Categories:

Finance

Hi Oskar,

Unfortunately, your observation is correct. There is no support for vendor approval in the standard application when creating new vendors. The feature for vendor and vendor bank account is having the words "proposed vendor change". The focus is on specific field changes only.

You can have a look at an ISV solution from Staedean (formerly To-Increase) having a support for data entry workflows. Using that solution you can configure data entry steps and approvals. When a creation or change workflow is then not completed, the vendor or changes made to the vendor will not be visible on the vendor master details. The solution can be used for (almost) all master and reference data tables.

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